Demo your iPhone without cables

Ars looks at a new demo utility that displays your iPhone screen live in a Mac …

A while back, I wrote about ScreenSplitr from Plutinosoft. Developer Sylvain Rebaud created a fantastic utility that lets you hook up a standard Apple video cable to your iPhone or iPod touch and watch your screen on a TV. With it, you can broadcast your iPhone display to any output device that takes composite or component input.

Today, Rebaud has taken that idea and run with it. His DemoGod utility lets you skip the cables and send your screen directly to a Mac. Apparently based on VNC and the venerable iPhoney utility, DemoGod displays your screen using data transmitted over WiFi. It's a great way to create demonstration videos.

To use this software, you need to have installed ScreenSplitr on your jailbroken iPhone. I already have done so and it's a well-loved constant on my SpringBoard. Next, just grab a copy of DemoGod and launch it on your Mac. DemoGod automatically searches for pairable devices, and ScreenSplitr must be running for this to work. Just select your device from DemoGod, accept the connection on your iPhone, and your data starts broadcasting to your Mac.

As you'd expect with a VNC-esque solution, the data rate is barely adequate. It is comparable to installing Jay Freeman's Veency and using a normal VNC client. (A solution, which I should mention, is not Mac-specific as DemoGod currently is.) What DemoGod gets you that Veency and, say, Chicken of the VNC do not, is that your demo looks like it is running on an iPhone. The iPhoney frame shows your interaction in an iPhone setting, which can be used in either portrait or landscape mode. With a white screen background and a movie capture utility like Snapz Pro or Copernicus, you can create very clean, very iPhone-looking demo videos for use on your site or marketing materials.

DemoGod is free and available from the Plutinosoft website, where you can also watch a video of it in action.